Taiwan Travelogue by Thuang-Zi Wang, Translated by Lin King

Thursday, June 11, 2026--San Antonio

Taiwan Travelogue by Thuang-Zi Wang and translated by Lin King is a book with an interesting history.  It is based on a year of traveling and speaking in Taiwan in 1939  when it was a Japanese territory and the original author, a Japanese mainland woman kept detail journals of her experiences.  It was first published in the 1950s.  It has had several publications over the years which have been in Japanese, Mandarin, and now in English.  The English version won the National Book Award last year for best translated literature and it won the Booker International Prize this year.  Because it was based on the journals and because the author of those was fascinated by trying local foods, there are lots of details related to multiple-course meals included--so many that I started rushing through them.  The main story is about the slowly developing relationship between the Japanese mainland author and her assigned island-born Japanese female translator and guide of the same age and how the cultural structure of how Japanese people must interact and respond to each other in general and also between class levels created problems with acceptance and understanding between the two women.  There are many footnotes to explain types of foods and name differences between Mandarin and Japanese and between place names of the time and those of today so the reader can better follow the story if they want to go to a present-day map or have been to Taiwan and traveled around the country as I have done.  I enjoyed the story, but my rating is 3 1/2 stars out of 5 because of so many food details that take up maybe 30% or more of the text.

The News from Dublin by Colm Toibin

Wednesday, June 3, 2026--San Antonio

The News from Dublin by Colm Toibin is a collection of short stories that was just recently published.  I have read novels by him previously.  As usual, his writing is wonderful. Although the author is Irish (and lives in the USA), his stories in this collection take place in various locations in the world and represent different points in time.  The biggest problem I had was that I had not realized it was a collection of short stories.  So as I read the first, then the second, and moved to the third, I kept trying to figure out how those "chapters" were all going to eventually fit together.  But I double-checked and realized that each was its own short story.  I gave this collection a rating of 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Friday, May 29, 2026--San Antonio

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.  It is a very detailed novel during about a period of days changed the life of a 45-year-old professor of poety (and former high school teacher),  Severe pain occurs in his belly.  Five days later the pain has not gone away and he heads to the Emergency Room at the local hospital.  Most of the book covers his experiences, interactions, and wandering thoughts during the 10-11 days at the hospital--at the emergency room on the first day and then in thein the Intensive Care Unit.  The protagonist had a dangerous situation related to a tear to the inner lining of his aorta and there were indications of inflamation that could be the cause.  Multiple teams of doctors were involved to try to search for the cause of the inflamation so they could treat it while they were giving him heavy doses of antibiotics intraveneously in hopes that they would take care of whatever the cause was if they could never noarrow it down through their lab tests, scans, etc.  The author is obviously a good writer, but the story goes into so much detail about the hospital experience and veers off at one point for many detailed pages about poety that I found myself wishing to move on.  I did start skipping pages about poety; the topic was not interesting to me and it had nothing to do with moving the story of his situation forward.  I often notice that an author is so interested in his specialty topic that he ends up writing too much about it in a novel--providing far more information than either the story needs or reader needs or wants.  In this case I, therefore, downgraded my rating to 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

Tuesday, May 36, 2026--San Antonio

All Them Dogs by Djamel White is set in an area of Dubin where people live in council houses, are poor, and where drug gangs operate by recruiting young teenagers to do their dirty work so that those running the gangs get rich and keep their hands clean.  Tony ran away to England for 5 years after a murder that would likely have been pinned on him.  He has just returned and has been recruited to be the right-hand man of one of the mid-level guys in the gang--a guy he remembers from being a year ahead of him in school.  But things have changed.  There are now factions wanting to break away from the main gang.  There's more heavy-handed deailings occurring and more murders.  And Tony is going to learn a lot of things he would rather not know and to remember something that he had blocked out of his mind from 5 years ago.  And the reader is going to know all long that Tony should have stayed in London.  He's too sensitive to be involved in this kind of life and has a secret about himself that should have caused him to stay gone.  It's an exciting book with lots of action that provokes lots of thinking on the part of a reader.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

Friday, May 22, 2026--San Antonio

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle was named a top book of 2025.  It is science fiction dealing with an alternative concept of the afterlife.  (Another book I read previously, Under the Whispering Door, had a similar theme.)  In this book, a young man keeps having tastes show up in his mouth that are very detailed.  While working at a bar and serving a final customer of the night, he has the sensation of the taste of a drink.  He makes it and hands it to the man in front of him.  At the first sip, sparkles occur in the air that come together in a non-solid form but one that can communicate by voice.  It is the ghost of his lost wife.  They communicate with each other under he takes the last sip of the drink causing he to then disappear again.  Most of the tastes he gets like this are for food.  He tests a theory by trying to recreate them, but he doesn't know enough about cooking to do it exactly right, so he gets a job as a dishwasher in a nice restaurant and starts observing and learning from the cooks.  Eventually, he learns enough that he brings back an occasional ghost but not always.  When and why does it work?  Is he doing these people a favor by bringing back the ghosts?  Is he doing the ghosts a favor or creating a problem for them?  He approaches it all with an altruistc attitude of trying to help both people and ghosts.  But he is doing it still without complete understanding of the questions he had been asking himself--based instead on assumptions he is making.  And others who do not have altruistic attitudes become involved.  There is a grand climax with major aftereffects.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Sunday, May 16, 2026--San Antonio

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun was written 5 years ago.  I found it on a list of suggested books for summer reading.  It's a romantic comedy based around the production of a reality TV show where the "prince" is expected to find his "princess" among 20 women competing to be the one he asks to marry him.  The show has been made for almost 2 decades and is a little "tired."  Everyone knows that it is always white, religious men and women participating, that only a very small number of matches have been successful over time, and that former contestants have revealed that they were never looking for marriage or everlasting love but participated for various other reasons--to promote their podcast, to possibly become famous and get better job offers, to take advantage of the travel aspects of the show (which goes to various parts of the world during each season), etc.  This year's prince is a man who was a co-owner of a highly successful tech company where he did the behind-the-scenes work like programming to make it successful.  But his partner in the company greatly embarrassed him by exposing his awkwardness (OCD), anxiety, and related social interaction problems and then fired him.  He can't get another job in IT because of the bad publicity and world-of-mouth from that incident.  He has signed up to go on this show to try to find a way to reintroduce himself to the world, especially the IT world where he would like to work again.  Things are awkward from the beginning of the shooting of the show because of his mental and social problems, but his handler (the producer assigned to be with him and guide him throughout the production period of 3 months) immediately realizes that the problems he has can be overcome if he can calm him, get him to open up about what is happening, get him to trust him, etc.  The book carries the reader through the various weeks of production and the problems that are occurring.  The questions that are always present:  1)  Will he be able to avoid being awkward on the show?  Will the show be interesting enough for audiences enjoy if he cannot come across and warm and caring?  Will he be able to fall in love with one of the women?  Will everything fall apart?  And most of all, will his handler be able to do his job which seems almost impossible with the problems the prince has?  It isn't great literature, but it's a fun story to read.  I gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

White River Crossing by Ian McGuire

Friday, May 15, 2026--San Antonio

White River Crossing by Ian McGuire is historical fiction set in far north central Canada in the late 1700s.  The Hudson Bay Company has an outpost there for trading for pelts brought in by European and Native American hunters.  The story revolves around multiple people--the manager of the company's outpost, his second in command, the manager's young nephew, the post's doctor, a former sailor who came to work for the company after the death of his only friend, and one of chiefs of a trusted nearby native tribe along with his wife, son, and son's wife.  A block of quartz with two veins of pure gold have been brought to the manager of the post who decides that he can trust the person bringing it is telling the truth about where he says it is from and how much is there.  The area is much further north in the Barrens where the Eskimos (considered to be a dangerous group) live.  Realizing the value of the find if there is gold there and what it could mean to him personally, the manager decides to manage the situation privately (off the company books, but paying the man who brought the block with goods from the company's stores while hiding the missing items from the company records).  He makes a plan to send 3 men he can trust (his assistant, his nephew, and the former sailor) there with the two northern Indian couples as their support to find the gold if it exists and to mine it during the winter season when getting there and back is easiest because of frozen river crossings and it being the "off season" when ships cannot come and go to the post to pick up pelts and unload supplies which means the men are not needed at the post.  The problems with the excursion begin because of various reasons, but the two main ones are that the son of the chief who is a hothead and believes he is stronger and smarter than everyone else and that he is never honored appropriately and the assistant manager who is a bully and enjoys challenging, dominating, and laughing at people.  Only one person makes it back to the company at the end of the season.  Because the manager planned the excursion as a way of taking advantage of the opportunity for himself, he asks that there be no leak of information about what happened.  But that just raises questions among all the other men at the post who knew those who went (on a trip they were told was for investigating the news of a copper mine possibility to keep everyone from rushing off to find gold themselves) wonder why all the secrecy and why only one person returned.  The details of the story are interesting and actually fascinating.  It's a short novel, only 288 pages.  I gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.